Let's face it, the original poster was probably thinking about all the IT McJobs that Microsoft's shoddy software created for us. These jobs were filled with MSCEs, CNAs, and the like.
I think it's time to get rid of the McJobs in IT by replacing all that shitty software.
I used to live in the Boston area, and you simply must be shitting me. Dead zones on 95 south? And with all the nerds and yuppies flying down that road at high speed (as I used to)? If what you say is true, it boggles my mind. Why do you put up with it? Eastern MA should be one of the areas in the US with the best reception, like NYC and long stretches of coastal CA.
Of course, I've never had a cellphone, so I don't know that much about coverage experiences. Even when I was making $35/hr I could never justify the expense.
I've always had a gut feeling there had be an EASIER way to get tonnage to space -- it's just a matter of time and innovation.
You have omitted an essential element that the US Space Program has been missing for years: willful vision.
To be fair to the USSP, lighter-than-air transport methods have been dismissed since the 1930s for the obvious, but cowardly reason. The US lost many of her military airships due to accidents; and with the Hindenberg, that technology was put to bed (i.e. niche markets only)... up to and including now. No doubt that any planner at NASA who proposed airships-to-orbit was soon marginalized, since everybody around him "just knew" that airships were an unworkable technology. Nobody used them... hence, nobody could use them.
The blimp in Stephenson's The Diamond Age was filled with vacuum, and a cyberpunk author did something similar with tall buildings in one of his books (building tops were large balloons whose lift helped support the building weight so the thing could carry more floors).
This is different than a gasbag put into a vacuum. Stephenson's blimps were under compression, and the proposed blimp-in-space is under tension.
Compression's a bitch. Holding a 500-foot-dia sphere in enough equalized compression to avoid buckling and collapse is insanely difficult, which is why nanotech was the narrative used to justify it. But tension? Ha, tension's a walk in the park particularly for materials formed into skins.
Just eyeballing it, we have more than enough common materials like mylar that can produce a gasbag of sufficient size (i.e. common Goodyear blimp). If the tension proves too much for mylar, then some strenghtening can be done like sail makers do all the time, with carbon-fiber thread wrappings, etc. But my rule-of-thumb gets hazy for things that are kilometers in size under the gas pressures they must contain, since tension rises appreciably with the radius of curvature.
I don't agree with you, but the word "herb" reveals an interesting treatment of the leading H letter in English. The trouble with a word like "herb" is that there're sound precedents for pronouncing the H and not.
Unfortunately, "digitizing the whole roomful shouldn't take more than a few days" is a prevailing and default line of thought, and is part of a larger mental illness that has led people to tell me things on the order of "any teenager can do what you do with computers". It is always a priority with me to see that the pain of computer work climbs back up the chain of command so that they don't start reverting to this way of thinking. Eternal Vigilence!
I called the Boston Globe in 1989 to get a copy of the paper to look for jobs there. What I heard on the phone was:
"Welcome to the BAAAH-ston Globe Circulation De-PAAAHT-ment."
To my knowledge, there were no "h" letters in the words BOSTON and DEPARTMENT.
Once you recognize that things like this can be added to words, then they can be removed, and then in that state of removal you can postulate "accentless" English.
For the record, Midwestern American English is about as clean as you can get in the wild. I know there are still aberrations like "warsh" (i.e. "Betty-Sue, did you warsh my clothes?") in it, but altogther nothing so drastic as the Bostonian or Southern accents.
Note that I may be using the term "accent" incorrectly with samples provided, but it's the overall flavor of the language that I'm trying to convey here.
Don't forget the Family Leave Act, and all that overhead that goes along with a 35-45 year old man with teenage kids that manage to start a fire, chop off a finger, or generally invoke some sort of emergency requiring Daddy's attention about once every 3 months. Apparently, people who really deserve children are the ones who can afford nannies to look over the little troublemakers during the day.
My suggestion for a much better insignia: two spheres, arranged side by side, while a rocket streaked between them... to symbolize the ass-fucking that NASA has given the American taxpayer since the 1970s. We could have been mining asteroids and comets by now, with solar power satellites beaming gigawatts to Earth and with O'Neill colonies in the preparation stages... but -- OH NO! -- that made too much economic sense, so we instead had NASA stand for the National Aerospace-industry and Shuttle Administration.
Of course, my suggested insignia needs this rendered in Latin: Pensions Favor the Bureaucrat.
You could -- I dunno, it's a radical thought -- stop attacking other countries and taking their oil. You might also want to stop concentrating wealth and destroying the middle class.
Firstly, what's going on is an unholy American-Israeli Axis of evil. They are out to conquer the world, pure and simple. If you think otherwise, you haven't read enough books, and you clearly avoid understanding current news events.
Secondly, America is busily killing itself off. The question for you is: how much of a fight will this vicious animal put up before it finally slumps into a mess of decaying debris?
I say this as a native American citizen, writing now in Toledo, Ohio. I'm in the veritable belly of the beast.
Contrary to what the people in the Middle East think, who have had to pick out the bodies of their relatives out of the rubble of their homes after the action of American and Israeli bombs, the real war is being fought in America. And the good guys are losing.
Behind the mercenary killers of the world's leading terrorist group -- the US Military -- there are millions of American taxpayers who are willingly paying into the system that buys all those bombs, bullets, guns and planes. It's gone too far to stop with just negotiation and diplomacy. Hence Bin Laden's use of airliners as missiles. Bin Laden obviously believed that America and Israel could no longer be negotiated with... and he's right, even before 911.
I'd like to say to the free peoples of the world, "hey, America is busy eating it's own belly, don't worry, just wait until Joe Sixpack finally can't even afford to drive to his workplace anymore", but I can't do that without acknowledging that the American military (rapacious as it is now) has yet to go truly beserk and wildly attack the free peoples of the world from the prompting of the millions of cowards living in (relative) safety inside America's enormously wide borders.
My advice to you is to actively marginalize the American-Israeli Axis as much as you can. Refuse to buy American or Israeli goods and refuse to use their services. Don't buy their bonds. And take further steps that demonstrate your power as an individual citizen of your own nation: When American or Israeli "leaders" show up in your country, urge your officals to deny entry; stay away from their parades; and overall demonstrate that you don't want such butchers setting foot in your peaceful area.
America's military forces need financial backing, like any mercenary force. If you marginalize their finances, then you can deny that pack of killers their ability to cross the world and drop bombs on you.
Don't take this the wrong way, either, but Taylorism is a discredited philosophy. A technician has duties to both management AND customer. If you truly believe that the worker is supposed to satisfy "the people paying his paycheck", take a minute to recall that the customer is the ultimate source of the revenue that makes that paycheck possible.
And finally, the term "Golden Parachute" should more than emphasize that upper management is nearly immune to "consequences"... particularly so when they are paid so much wealth that in real terms they would never need to work for the rest of their lives. This immunity shrinks when you drop through the management ranks, but mid-level managers are still highly resistant to any of the consequences you may have in mind.
developing high-tech industry while regular industries and agriculture were suffering
Ohio's Governor Bob Taft may have tried such a thing, too, but the voters of Ohio threw a monkey wrench into his plans. I can hardly call resistance to outright wealth concentration being a "luddite streak". Investment of public funds in high-tech while letting the rural areas languish is nothing but class warfare. This is what really happened in Ohio; if this is what really happened in India, then the Indian people made a sensible choice.
That particular machine is a Pentium I, 100MHz, 32MB RAM, 500MB HDD, and finally a 56K modem. It works just fine for browsing, email, spreadsheets, etc.
Of course, it's not even the low end 1337 g4/\/\1ng platform. Like I give a rat's ass.
If it works, don't upgrade it -- it will soon stop working if you do.
My life has been a constant state of uncertainty since 1997, hence I'm used to putting things off. Nevertheless, you're right. It's only 40 bucks; heck, I gave the Slacksters 50 for a copy of Slackware. I'll cut Opera a check tonight.
Roger that. I was all prepared to use PayPal, then after hearing rumors and spending some time surfing sites criticizing PayPal, I ended up not trusting them to handle my money. Result? Another customer lost (i.e. not gained).
PayPal has yet to learn that a customer has to be presumed innocent before proven guilty. This leads to loss, which as a consumer I expect to pay for as higher fees when I become a business client. I prefer this way of doing business over the way PayPal obviously adheres to, in which customer guilt is assumed and hence keeps PayPal's losses low, which I presume are passed onto the (surviving) client base as stable or lower fees. Note I said SURVIVING.
Frustrated by endless MSIE crashes on a Win95 machine with cramped RAM and HDD, I finally gave up in disgust a year ago and installed Opera.
It was like night and day... even though it still crashes about 10% as often as MSIE did. Opera struck me as so well constructed, and so responsive to user methods, that I am still thinking of buying it to reward the company that made such a gem. As you said, tabs can make browsing much better.
Of course, Opera's example is what we should have always had. It's only MSIE's dominance that led us to accept particularly bad software.
$1K/pill? You must be on drugs yourself if you think that it will be that cheap.
In 2025, a life-extension pill will cost about 30% of the gross yearly median income. In 2004 dollars, this will probably mean about $10K per pill.
Massive insurance involvement will be required to bring this horribly expensive pill to the people who live in the bottom 3 quintiles... which will only expand their overall poorness given the horrendous premiums that will result. The bottom quintile will probably see the $1K/yr you envision... as an increase in their health insurance payments.
The increasingly fucked-up IP laws will ensure that this magic pill will have a very limited production. By "limited" I mean in distribution-from-production. There will be no real shortage... they're only pills, even nano-constructed, and will be made by the millions. But those millions will sit in guarded warehouses. And they will only be shipped to end consumers only after the proper blizzard of forms and payments.
"Health care" is so expensive today since it brings good promise of stopping the past incurables... people will pay anything for another few years of life, so their lack of restraint drives up the price. From that, I posit that the greater the promise of the fix, the greater desperation of the demand for it.
You shouldn't continue the mistake of making tech predictions in a political or socioeconomic vacuum.
Why can't the federal government set a few priorities (outlined clearly in the constitution), get those priorities done, and leave the rest of us alone?
Because no bully leaves you alone when you whine that you want to be left alone. The whine itself gives the bully the spur to continue abusing you. Stop whining and start fighting.
My friend, I'm in a really bad mood and you are going to pay the price.
You are a complete fucking ass if you didn't realize that banks don't want your business. Banks only want companies and individuals with lots of money to be their customers. Everyone else can just go straight to fucking hell and die as far as they are concerned.
I should know. I work in a "super-regional bank" as an IT field tech. The bank is cutting costs to the point that within 2 years the customers are going to flee like locusts from flame.
Banks don't want tellers or branches. Tellers cost money, and the bank branch itself costs money to run.
Banks don't want low-volume checking accounts. There tend to be many thousands of these, and that just costs money to process them since it requires more of that unskilled labor, which like tellers, is a waste of money.
I knew the banking industry was a complete fucking wad when I went into a branch of a bank in 1997 with a check made out to me from one of their accounts, and they had the nerve to try to charge me $3 (now $5) to cash it. A check is a "demand payment" but the tellers asserted that I was not their customer. The bank blindly refused to acknowledge that their "customer" (the man who wrote the check) still expected the payment to be honored even when it involved the recipient wandering up and getting the money directly.
Since 1997, I stopped having a bank account, but had to get one since my employer only uses direct deposit. I remove the money every 2 weeks and keep it somewhere safe. God knows a bank account isn't safe anymore (I'm sure paypalsucks.com can give you some idea).
Firstly, what's happening here is more deceptive than fraudulent. In short, it's predation upon consumer ignorance, and government has no responsibility for the contents of your mind.
Companies that take advantage of people like this should lose their customer base. Nobody needs a cellphone, dipshit. The demand for cellphones is at an appallingly insensible high point and people should right-size their needs. I see poor people walking along with cellphones. They are getting exactly what they deserve.
So, I blame the consumer. I already know businessmen are scumbags, but they are free to humiliate themselves in public with their slimy business practices. People put up with it since they are sheep. Stop being sheep!
Businesses that act like trapdoor spiders -- inviting people in with simple slogans them baffling them with conditions and other bullshit -- should lose their customers. A 5000-page "agreement" is an outrageous sign that they want to fuck you over. Learn to identify the signs and then shun them. Power comes from the people, not officials. We The People can shut down any business we chose... without reliance upon the assholes in the legislature.
Motorized scooters? Yes, I did notice the latest expansion in the overall resounding parenting failure in America.
I'm not a harsh man in general, but I admit to a certain sense of smugness as I wait for one of these little miscreants to get smeared across an intersection that they failed to stop for.
Their parents are complete morons. You don't hand a motorized scooter to a 12-year-old and then turn your back. That is, you don't do it and then expect to NOT hear a sickening {crunch} sound.
I'd say this was Darwinism in action, but the parents are the truly deserving population and they will not have to pay the ultimate price (i.e. death) for their stupidity. Typical of America, the children are the ones to bear the brunt of the damage.
Those kids who survive will then carry on the expanded danger attitude into the next generation. Perhaps parents in 2025 will be handing their kids "some assembly required" personal helicopter kits... hours later, they turn their backs while the {whop-whop-whop} sound fades into the distance.
I posit that you'd have to take certain frame of mind to understand that the "lack[ing] people skills such as communication and teamwork" quote makes perfect sense. The frame you need is fraud. Communication and teamwork are well required when trying to loot a company for the benefit of stockholders (the population of which, the company executives doing the looting must be counted in). From my experience with techies and engineers, they are a generally work-honest lot who are not prone to build up fraudulent schemes. In contrast, MBAs pop out of college ready to steal anything, cheat anyone, and lie until they themselves don't know what's real anymore.
Added to this, we must try to get an actual answer from the elites (who push outsourcing and offshoring) to: when you ship the bulk of your business overseas, why do you think that you won't lose control of company assets?
I'm more that suspicious about the term "innovation" as it is constantly applied to the American work scene. Firstly, innovation implies research, but R&D workcenters are eminently offshoreable. Secondly, innovation also implies a certain elitism that denies the right of the common man to earn a living wage for his daily efforts. There's nothing innovative about hauling a truckload of material on a set weekly schedule... yet it still must be done.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's face it, the original poster was probably thinking about all the IT McJobs that Microsoft's shoddy software created for us. These jobs were filled with MSCEs, CNAs, and the like.
I think it's time to get rid of the McJobs in IT by replacing all that shitty software.
I used to live in the Boston area, and you simply must be shitting me. Dead zones on 95 south? And with all the nerds and yuppies flying down that road at high speed (as I used to)? If what you say is true, it boggles my mind. Why do you put up with it? Eastern MA should be one of the areas in the US with the best reception, like NYC and long stretches of coastal CA.
Of course, I've never had a cellphone, so I don't know that much about coverage experiences. Even when I was making $35/hr I could never justify the expense.
I've always had a gut feeling there had be an EASIER way to get tonnage to space -- it's just a matter of time and innovation.
... up to and including now. No doubt that any planner at NASA who proposed airships-to-orbit was soon marginalized, since everybody around him "just knew" that airships were an unworkable technology. Nobody used them ... hence, nobody could use them.
You have omitted an essential element that the US Space Program has been missing for years: willful vision.
To be fair to the USSP, lighter-than-air transport methods have been dismissed since the 1930s for the obvious, but cowardly reason. The US lost many of her military airships due to accidents; and with the Hindenberg, that technology was put to bed (i.e. niche markets only)
The blimp in Stephenson's The Diamond Age was filled with vacuum, and a cyberpunk author did something similar with tall buildings in one of his books (building tops were large balloons whose lift helped support the building weight so the thing could carry more floors).
This is different than a gasbag put into a vacuum. Stephenson's blimps were under compression, and the proposed blimp-in-space is under tension.
Compression's a bitch. Holding a 500-foot-dia sphere in enough equalized compression to avoid buckling and collapse is insanely difficult, which is why nanotech was the narrative used to justify it. But tension? Ha, tension's a walk in the park particularly for materials formed into skins.
Just eyeballing it, we have more than enough common materials like mylar that can produce a gasbag of sufficient size (i.e. common Goodyear blimp). If the tension proves too much for mylar, then some strenghtening can be done like sail makers do all the time, with carbon-fiber thread wrappings, etc. But my rule-of-thumb gets hazy for things that are kilometers in size under the gas pressures they must contain, since tension rises appreciably with the radius of curvature.
I don't agree with you, but the word "herb" reveals an interesting treatment of the leading H letter in English. The trouble with a word like "herb" is that there're sound precedents for pronouncing the H and not.
Unfortunately, "digitizing the whole roomful shouldn't take more than a few days" is a prevailing and default line of thought, and is part of a larger mental illness that has led people to tell me things on the order of "any teenager can do what you do with computers". It is always a priority with me to see that the pain of computer work climbs back up the chain of command so that they don't start reverting to this way of thinking. Eternal Vigilence!
I called the Boston Globe in 1989 to get a copy of the paper to look for jobs there. What I heard on the phone was:
"Welcome to the BAAAH-ston Globe Circulation De-PAAAHT-ment."
To my knowledge, there were no "h" letters in the words BOSTON and DEPARTMENT.
Once you recognize that things like this can be added to words, then they can be removed, and then in that state of removal you can postulate "accentless" English.
For the record, Midwestern American English is about as clean as you can get in the wild. I know there are still aberrations like "warsh" (i.e. "Betty-Sue, did you warsh my clothes?") in it, but altogther nothing so drastic as the Bostonian or Southern accents.
Note that I may be using the term "accent" incorrectly with samples provided, but it's the overall flavor of the language that I'm trying to convey here.
Don't forget the Family Leave Act, and all that overhead that goes along with a 35-45 year old man with teenage kids that manage to start a fire, chop off a finger, or generally invoke some sort of emergency requiring Daddy's attention about once every 3 months. Apparently, people who really deserve children are the ones who can afford nannies to look over the little troublemakers during the day.
My suggestion for a much better insignia: two spheres, arranged side by side, while a rocket streaked between them ... to symbolize the ass-fucking that NASA has given the American taxpayer since the 1970s. We could have been mining asteroids and comets by now, with solar power satellites beaming gigawatts to Earth and with O'Neill colonies in the preparation stages ... but -- OH NO! -- that made too much economic sense, so we instead had NASA stand for the National Aerospace-industry and Shuttle Administration.
Of course, my suggested insignia needs this rendered in Latin: Pensions Favor the Bureaucrat.
You could -- I dunno, it's a radical thought -- stop attacking other countries and taking their oil. You might also want to stop concentrating wealth and destroying the middle class.
Firstly, what's going on is an unholy American-Israeli Axis of evil. They are out to conquer the world, pure and simple. If you think otherwise, you haven't read enough books, and you clearly avoid understanding current news events.
... and he's right, even before 911.
Secondly, America is busily killing itself off. The question for you is: how much of a fight will this vicious animal put up before it finally slumps into a mess of decaying debris?
I say this as a native American citizen, writing now in Toledo, Ohio. I'm in the veritable belly of the beast.
Contrary to what the people in the Middle East think, who have had to pick out the bodies of their relatives out of the rubble of their homes after the action of American and Israeli bombs, the real war is being fought in America. And the good guys are losing.
Behind the mercenary killers of the world's leading terrorist group -- the US Military -- there are millions of American taxpayers who are willingly paying into the system that buys all those bombs, bullets, guns and planes. It's gone too far to stop with just negotiation and diplomacy. Hence Bin Laden's use of airliners as missiles. Bin Laden obviously believed that America and Israel could no longer be negotiated with
I'd like to say to the free peoples of the world, "hey, America is busy eating it's own belly, don't worry, just wait until Joe Sixpack finally can't even afford to drive to his workplace anymore", but I can't do that without acknowledging that the American military (rapacious as it is now) has yet to go truly beserk and wildly attack the free peoples of the world from the prompting of the millions of cowards living in (relative) safety inside America's enormously wide borders.
My advice to you is to actively marginalize the American-Israeli Axis as much as you can. Refuse to buy American or Israeli goods and refuse to use their services. Don't buy their bonds. And take further steps that demonstrate your power as an individual citizen of your own nation: When American or Israeli "leaders" show up in your country, urge your officals to deny entry; stay away from their parades; and overall demonstrate that you don't want such butchers setting foot in your peaceful area.
America's military forces need financial backing, like any mercenary force. If you marginalize their finances, then you can deny that pack of killers their ability to cross the world and drop bombs on you.
Don't take this the wrong way, either, but Taylorism is a discredited philosophy. A technician has duties to both management AND customer. If you truly believe that the worker is supposed to satisfy "the people paying his paycheck", take a minute to recall that the customer is the ultimate source of the revenue that makes that paycheck possible.
... particularly so when they are paid so much wealth that in real terms they would never need to work for the rest of their lives. This immunity shrinks when you drop through the management ranks, but mid-level managers are still highly resistant to any of the consequences you may have in mind.
And finally, the term "Golden Parachute" should more than emphasize that upper management is nearly immune to "consequences"
developing high-tech industry while regular industries and agriculture were suffering
Ohio's Governor Bob Taft may have tried such a thing, too, but the voters of Ohio threw a monkey wrench into his plans. I can hardly call resistance to outright wealth concentration being a "luddite streak". Investment of public funds in high-tech while letting the rural areas languish is nothing but class warfare. This is what really happened in Ohio; if this is what really happened in India, then the Indian people made a sensible choice.
"What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away."
That particular machine is a Pentium I, 100MHz, 32MB RAM, 500MB HDD, and finally a 56K modem. It works just fine for browsing, email, spreadsheets, etc.
Of course, it's not even the low end 1337 g4/\/\1ng platform. Like I give a rat's ass.
If it works, don't upgrade it -- it will soon stop working if you do.
My life has been a constant state of uncertainty since 1997, hence I'm used to putting things off. Nevertheless, you're right. It's only 40 bucks; heck, I gave the Slacksters 50 for a copy of Slackware. I'll cut Opera a check tonight.
Roger that. I was all prepared to use PayPal, then after hearing rumors and spending some time surfing sites criticizing PayPal, I ended up not trusting them to handle my money. Result? Another customer lost (i.e. not gained).
PayPal has yet to learn that a customer has to be presumed innocent before proven guilty. This leads to loss, which as a consumer I expect to pay for as higher fees when I become a business client. I prefer this way of doing business over the way PayPal obviously adheres to, in which customer guilt is assumed and hence keeps PayPal's losses low, which I presume are passed onto the (surviving) client base as stable or lower fees. Note I said SURVIVING.
Just call me a business socialist. {smirk}
Frustrated by endless MSIE crashes on a Win95 machine with cramped RAM and HDD, I finally gave up in disgust a year ago and installed Opera.
... even though it still crashes about 10% as often as MSIE did. Opera struck me as so well constructed, and so responsive to user methods, that I am still thinking of buying it to reward the company that made such a gem. As you said, tabs can make browsing much better.
It was like night and day
Of course, Opera's example is what we should have always had. It's only MSIE's dominance that led us to accept particularly bad software.
$1K/pill? You must be on drugs yourself if you think that it will be that cheap.
... which will only expand their overall poorness given the horrendous premiums that will result. The bottom quintile will probably see the $1K/yr you envision ... as an increase in their health insurance payments.
... they're only pills, even nano-constructed, and will be made by the millions. But those millions will sit in guarded warehouses. And they will only be shipped to end consumers only after the proper blizzard of forms and payments.
... people will pay anything for another few years of life, so their lack of restraint drives up the price. From that, I posit that the greater the promise of the fix, the greater desperation of the demand for it.
In 2025, a life-extension pill will cost about 30% of the gross yearly median income. In 2004 dollars, this will probably mean about $10K per pill.
Massive insurance involvement will be required to bring this horribly expensive pill to the people who live in the bottom 3 quintiles
The increasingly fucked-up IP laws will ensure that this magic pill will have a very limited production. By "limited" I mean in distribution-from-production. There will be no real shortage
"Health care" is so expensive today since it brings good promise of stopping the past incurables
You shouldn't continue the mistake of making tech predictions in a political or socioeconomic vacuum.
Why can't the federal government set a few priorities (outlined clearly in the constitution), get those priorities done, and leave the rest of us alone?
Because no bully leaves you alone when you whine that you want to be left alone. The whine itself gives the bully the spur to continue abusing you. Stop whining and start fighting.
My friend, I'm in a really bad mood and you are going to pay the price.
You are a complete fucking ass if you didn't realize that banks don't want your business. Banks only want companies and individuals with lots of money to be their customers. Everyone else can just go straight to fucking hell and die as far as they are concerned.
I should know. I work in a "super-regional bank" as an IT field tech. The bank is cutting costs to the point that within 2 years the customers are going to flee like locusts from flame.
Banks don't want tellers or branches. Tellers cost money, and the bank branch itself costs money to run.
Banks don't want low-volume checking accounts. There tend to be many thousands of these, and that just costs money to process them since it requires more of that unskilled labor, which like tellers, is a waste of money.
I knew the banking industry was a complete fucking wad when I went into a branch of a bank in 1997 with a check made out to me from one of their accounts, and they had the nerve to try to charge me $3 (now $5) to cash it. A check is a "demand payment" but the tellers asserted that I was not their customer. The bank blindly refused to acknowledge that their "customer" (the man who wrote the check) still expected the payment to be honored even when it involved the recipient wandering up and getting the money directly.
Since 1997, I stopped having a bank account, but had to get one since my employer only uses direct deposit. I remove the money every 2 weeks and keep it somewhere safe. God knows a bank account isn't safe anymore (I'm sure paypalsucks.com can give you some idea).
Firstly, what's happening here is more deceptive than fraudulent. In short, it's predation upon consumer ignorance, and government has no responsibility for the contents of your mind.
... without reliance upon the assholes in the legislature.
Companies that take advantage of people like this should lose their customer base. Nobody needs a cellphone, dipshit. The demand for cellphones is at an appallingly insensible high point and people should right-size their needs. I see poor people walking along with cellphones. They are getting exactly what they deserve.
So, I blame the consumer. I already know businessmen are scumbags, but they are free to humiliate themselves in public with their slimy business practices. People put up with it since they are sheep. Stop being sheep!
Businesses that act like trapdoor spiders -- inviting people in with simple slogans them baffling them with conditions and other bullshit -- should lose their customers. A 5000-page "agreement" is an outrageous sign that they want to fuck you over. Learn to identify the signs and then shun them. Power comes from the people, not officials. We The People can shut down any business we chose
Motorized scooters? Yes, I did notice the latest expansion in the overall resounding parenting failure in America.
... hours later, they turn their backs while the {whop-whop-whop} sound fades into the distance.
I'm not a harsh man in general, but I admit to a certain sense of smugness as I wait for one of these little miscreants to get smeared across an intersection that they failed to stop for.
Their parents are complete morons. You don't hand a motorized scooter to a 12-year-old and then turn your back. That is, you don't do it and then expect to NOT hear a sickening {crunch} sound.
I'd say this was Darwinism in action, but the parents are the truly deserving population and they will not have to pay the ultimate price (i.e. death) for their stupidity. Typical of America, the children are the ones to bear the brunt of the damage.
Those kids who survive will then carry on the expanded danger attitude into the next generation. Perhaps parents in 2025 will be handing their kids "some assembly required" personal helicopter kits
I posit that you'd have to take certain frame of mind to understand that the "lack[ing] people skills such as communication and teamwork" quote makes perfect sense. The frame you need is fraud. Communication and teamwork are well required when trying to loot a company for the benefit of stockholders (the population of which, the company executives doing the looting must be counted in). From my experience with techies and engineers, they are a generally work-honest lot who are not prone to build up fraudulent schemes. In contrast, MBAs pop out of college ready to steal anything, cheat anyone, and lie until they themselves don't know what's real anymore.
Added to this, we must try to get an actual answer from the elites (who push outsourcing and offshoring) to: when you ship the bulk of your business overseas, why do you think that you won't lose control of company assets?
I'm more that suspicious about the term "innovation" as it is constantly applied to the American work scene. Firstly, innovation implies research, but R&D workcenters are eminently offshoreable. Secondly, innovation also implies a certain elitism that denies the right of the common man to earn a living wage for his daily efforts. There's nothing innovative about hauling a truckload of material on a set weekly schedule ... yet it still must be done.